Thursday, January 26, 2012

Elite Empathy For The Ruled

Ilya Somin at Volokh Conspiracy has some discussion about Charles Murray's quiz for elites, whether they understand and empathise with the middle and lower classes whose lives they rule in a general sense. Somin has several objections to the quiz and the concept.

I think Ilya has it right here. It is pretty clear what Murray is driving at. We do sense that it is better that the elites of a society understand the lives of the non-elites. Yet I agree that Murray has not captured it, nor is it an easily-defined quality. There are rulers who have great understanding of the lives of the great mass of their subjects – Ceausescu was a cobbler, I believe – yet are horrible; there are pure aristocrats with little identification with the proles who are nonetheless excellent rulers. Victoria, perhaps. Or Churchill. The common touch, valued everywhere but nowhere so much as in America, is an advantage but not strictly necessary. I don’t think the questions tell us much. Perhaps in aggregate they begin to point to something real.

Also, we are not quite clear what this quality is that we should hope for, but only a theory as to how it is acquired. If it is empathy we seek, should we not simply say so? Are we perhaps describing the impression that the lower and middle class have that an upper-class person does understand them? We would then want to measure something in their heads, not in the elites. Pollster questions sometimes ask: On a scale of 1-5, how much do you think the following candidates understand people like you? John Kerry was accused of being aloof and remote, raised in upper echelons and private schools and unable to identify with most Americans. Even his hunting – one of the things politicians do to show they are men of the people – was of the gentlemen’s club sort that has nearly vanished. But Kerry may have understood the perspective of the little guy just fine, I don’t know. He played hockey, which is in some areas a blue-collar endeavor and in others a rich kid’s sport. Impressions.

Is everyone who worked a few summers in a mill able to identify with the less well-off forty years later? Many of the New England well-off have experience sailing, climbing around in the White Mountains and living rather primitively for stretches, fishing in hard-to-get-to areas. Tragedies or medical conditions are great levelers.

In making such cultural divisions, we often find we aren't talking about anything very clearly. Folk music is on one side and country music on the other, except for bluegrass. And maybe classic country music, like Les Paul, and okay, Willie Nelson, and gee, what about Johnny Cash and Emmylou Harris, and, okay, I have no I idea what I'm talking about...

11 comments:

Kitten
said...

Saw the quiz on the ONT at Ace's. The questions were all yes/no and many seemed based on nearly stereotypical assumptions about "normal" people. I wouldn't have a clue how to construct a better test, but am still sure that this one didn't count as a _good_ one.

I don't know -- I took Murray's test and scored a 66, and I've lived outside the USA for over two decades. I'm first generation middle-class with rural, working class parents, and according to Murray's categories, such people average 69 on this little quiz, so I was just about there. I likely would have exceeded that number, in fact, if I were resident in the USA.

So I'd say the test did a fair job of reflecting the experiences I grew up with.

It's impossible, of course, for anyone to have such a broad perspective on life and how it's lived at different social strata that he can identify the 25 cultural markers that signify without fail the essence of each stratum. Fussell has hits and misses in Class, for example, and I think Murray does at least as well here.

One caveat: I might have done unusually well in matching up to Murray's markers because we hail from the same state, i.e. Iowa.

Well, that'll teach me for not looking more carefully. Apparently the ONT test was a pared down version of the one presented here. This one is a lot more flexible, and I notice I score a lot higher because of that.

I find the comments at Volokh to be both weird and highly defensive. This is not the only topic there that brings out such comments.

Like you, I understand what Murray is getting at and it offends the governing class. That class is essentially made up of the elites and since they do not understand the culture of majority they do not fit their governing toward the interests and needs of the governed. That is how we get the light bulb ban and toilets that do not flush. Both sound like great ideas, but they do not fit well with the broad class of the governed. If someone needs a payday loan to get by some weeks, spending $25 on a light bulb does not make sense even if it will save energy over the long haul. People need light today, not cheaper light tomorrow.

All this reenforces my belief that government is inherently evil. Over any period of time, government serves the purpose of the governors rather than the governed.

I scored a little less elite on the long-form test than I did on the short version. I'm in the mid-40s, which puts me somewhere between "A first-generation middle-class person with working-class parents and average television and moviegoing habits" (typical 66) and "A first-generation upper-middle-class person with middle-class parents" (typical 33). What class were my parents? No idea. More education than money, anyway; both had been quite poor in their youth, one desperately so, as in not quite enough to eat, but their families had been more prosperous before the Depression and always had included a sprinkling of educated professionals. In their middle age, they were financially stable and comfortable though not rich. If there had been an "American Idol" back then, my guess is they wouldn't have enjoyed it. They might have enjoyed a NASCAR event as a lark, but wouldn't have become devotees.

My husband and I lived for 18 years in a modest Houston suburb and knew a number of our neighbors via the neighborhood association. I really have no idea whether a majority of my 50 nearest neighbors had college degrees or not. It's not what we talked about. So I don't know whether I get those 7 points or not.

I liked the part about whether we had ever had a job that entailed coming home with pain -- no fair counting headaches or carpal tunnel syndrome! He has his audience's number.

There are a few things I'd slip into that test: Did you or your children participate in 4H? How many children do you have? (A minivan was much more useful than a pickup.) Did you and your friends have "goodie-box" exchanges of outgrown children's clothes?

That's just Socrates' problem. Definitions prove to be very slippery when you try to nail them down. Willie Nelson couldn't specify the difference in natural language, but he can make the music.

This is, as we say these days, a known issue. (Known for two thousand years and change, in this case.) The question is where you go from there. Plato would say that all music participates in the form of music, and in lesser forms as well. So, you won't be surprised to find that bluegrass falls under a higher form of music, even though that higher form includes other kinds that are clearly not bluegrass.

Aristotle would say that the real thing is the music, as practiced by particular musicians. Our creation of definitions follows from our own attempts to unify what they are doing into categories we know how to talk about.

Aristotle sounds more natural, most of the time; over time, I've come to believe that Plato was more completely correct. Aristotle says that to know courage you must first know men, to know what courage is for a man: it is different for a horse, he says. Yet to learn courage a man works with horses, and in getting up in the saddle again and again he becomes brave. And, at the same time, the horse learns to trust his rider, and so he becomes brave. The unity is the real thing, greater than the divisions.

Yes, the version of the quiz in Murray's book is much more sophisticated than that online version. Much as Mr. Tall found, both my wife and I found that our scores on Murray's full-length quiz were a surprisingly accurate measure of our current and our parents' class.

The quiz in the book is also much better than the first draft version that Murray put online himself about a year ago.

Steve - Good to know. It is of course likely that, as on the MMPI, no individual answer is that revealing, but in the aggregate your individual idiosyncrasies (of region, profession, temperament) cancel out and give an accurate picture.